DevExpress VCL Spreadsheet control (Coming soon in v15.1)

As Ray said yesterday when talking about the new Rating Control, he and I are going to take it in turns describing the new features and functionality in v15.1 over the next few days. Today, it’s my turn, so welcome to the new features in the ultimate in data analysis controls: the DevExpress VCL Spreadsheet.

Data Export

The first new piece of functionality for the spreadsheet isn’t really about the control itself, but about how it is used with controls in the rest of the VCL Subscription. In essence, we’ve now incorporated it as a principal component of our data export engine. This means that we now have one and only one export functionality for grid or tabular data, and this has allowed us to significantly simplify the data export engine's code and avoid code duplication when implementing new features, both of which are vital to a quickly changing feature set.

In particular, this merging of code provides the following features:

Ability to export data to CSV files

Ensuring cell number formats in the exported XLSX file are based on data cell display formats shown in the Grid, Tree List, Pivot Grid, and Vertical Grid controls

Detail grid Views can now be exported to XLS, XLSX, or TXT files

The progress of export operations can now be tracked, and aborted if necessary

Custom encoding formats for strings exported to TXT or CSV files

Ability to export images to XLS files, including those displayed by cxImageComboBox grid items

One consequence of this work is that the ExpressSpreadSheet Suite is now required for products – especially the grids and treelists – that provide export capabilities and will be automatically installed with them. Since the new spreadsheet was written to support later compilers only, this meant we had to drop support for older compilers.

Once DevExpress VCL v15.1 is released, the ExpressSpreadSheet Suite will be added to the ExpressGridPack and ExpressQuantumPack subscription packs. We will provide a free upgrade to the new SKUs to all customers that own an active subscription to these packs.

New functionality

The v15.1 release includes the following new features for the DevExpress VCL Spreadsheet Control:

Ability to outline or group data in a worksheet. This gives your users a much better facility for analyzing data using the spreadsheet.

A new built-in dialog for find and replace operations.

Support for Excel template files (XLT and XLTX files).

Ability to export an active worksheet to a TXT, XML, or HTML file.

Ability to iterate through all generated cell objects.

Support for the keyboard shortcuts that are available in Excel.

I’m sure you’ll agree these are some welcome new features (especially the data export enhancements). No doubt there are other features you’d like to see with the spreadsheet control, so please do let us know.

Spreadsheet control is so important, i hope it will be for firemonkey in future. I can not imagine working with Spreadsheet component on ios, android and osx :)

Best Regards.

12 June, 2015

David Le Franc

Hi,

some nice features:

- Mail Merge

- Wizard to create formula

- Fill handle to copy values and formulas

Of course, Mail Merge is very important for RichEditControl, but unfortunately it's not in 15.1!

Regards.

15 June, 2015

David Brennan

I like the idea of standardised and improved export routines, we've had some frustrations in the past with the various custom exports for each control.

22 June, 2015

Frank Ngo_1

Have you fixed the issue of Export to Excel's Out of memory when exporting more than 1,000,000 cells in this version?

24 June, 2015

Alex M (DevExpress)

@Frank: This issue is specific to 32-bit applications, right? If so, it hasn't been addressed yet.

29 June, 2015

Scott van der Linden 1

Does this mean that we can now export from a quantum grid into a live spreadsheet? That would be really cool! Also, it would be nice to send data from a TDataSet directly to a spreadsheet starting at a given cell. (Optionally with headers, Insert rows down.

What would be even more spectacular is if a link was made back to the TDataSet so that changed values could be posted back to the records/fields they came from!